Bob Dylan: A complicated and complicating poet

"I'M the first person who'll put it to you," Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview, "and the last person who'll explain it to you."

The Swedish Academy, which awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, has put it to us, and it has no explaining to do to most readers and listeners, however much they might have been pulling for Philip Roth or Don DeLillo or Margaret Atwood.

This Nobel acknowledges what we've long sensed to be true: that Dylan is among the most authentic voices America has produced, a maker of images as audacious and resonant as anything in Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.